The Tower at Stony Wood

One

She saw the knight in the mirror at sunset.

He rode alone down a road along a river. Where the black cloak he wore parted over his surcoat, she glimpsed towers of gold; the cloak fanned behind his back down the horse’s golden flanks. The knight’s head was bowed, his face in shadow. The jewel in the pommel of the sword hanging from his saddle flashed a bloody crimson in the last ray of light. His hair, swept back and gathered into a silver ring at his neck, was black as jet.

She mused over him, scratching absently at a fleabite. Her own long, woody hair, tangled and bunched as if small animals lived in it, fell over kelp-dark eyes that glittered now and then with uncertain color. She brushed at the hair in her face, then touched the mirror in its plain round frame lightly, as if to hold the image in place. The horse’s steady pace might have found its unchanging rhythm across miles, across countries. The knight followed the water’s slow path toward night. That much she could see from the way the light faded, faster than the water flowed, all down the river, leaving it mysterious with color. Beyond the tall trees growing along the river, she could see little; she had no idea where in the world he might be.

Melanthos, someone called far below. She shifted on her straw pallet, slapping the air as at a mosquito’s whine. At that moment, entranced by the mirror’s dreaming, she did not recognize her name. But the knight raised his head abruptly, as if he had heard.

A strong, sun-browned face looked out of the mirror at her. His eyes were unexpectedly light, the color of water, of the blade at his knee. She studied him, wondering curiously at the grim set of his mouth, the mingling of apprehension and resolve that honed the taut, clean lines of his face. Without taking her eyes from him, she reached beyond the mirror on the stone window ledge for an untidy pile of thread. The knight rode out of the mirror. The images in it faded until only her own face remained, her intent, curious eyes. But she remembered his colors. They remained reflected in her mind’s eye: gold, blood, silver, night.

She sorted through her threads with slender, bitten fingers, chose a needle and a square of linen. She threaded the needle and began with his face.

The story would come later.